When they got to the police station, Zach told Cage, “Hold everyone off. Let me have some private time with Sammy first. Okay?”
Cage nodded and squeezed his shoulder.
Zach opened the door.
Sammy saw him first and screamed, “Daaaa-ddyyyyy!” as he rushed forward and launched himself into his arms, hugging him tight with his legs straddling his chest. The boy was squeezing so tight that Zach could barely breathe. But who the hell cared about that! Tears ran down Zach’s face and onto Sammy’s neck. Sammy’s tears wet Zach’s neck, too.
Pushing his way into an interrogation room and slamming the door with his foot, Zach sat down and just held Sammy in his lap, head pressed against his heart. His clothing was filthy, and he smelled like he’d wet his pants a time or two, or worse, but he was whole and alive, and that was all that mattered.
Finally, Sammy pulled his head back and said, “I escaped.”
“I know you did. You’re a brave boy…I mean, little man.”
He shook his head. “No, I’m a little boy.” He hesitated, his bottom lip quivering. “Britta didn’t escape.”
“Well, now, we don’t know that for sure. We just haven’t found her yet.”
“They hurt her bad. Real bad.” He began to weep again. Between sobs, he revealed, “Sometimes…sometimes she let them hit her when they was aimin’ for me.”
That didn’t surprise Zach. Still, his eyes welled with tears again.
“She broke Daoud’s nose with my baseball bat when he came to capture us.”
Ah, so that’s whose blood it was.
“Her ankle mighta been broken. Do you think she coulda run with a broken ankle?”
“I think Britta could do anything she wanted.”
“We’re gonna get her back,” Sammy said, patting his shoulder as if he sensed his father’s despair. “I jis’ know we are.”
Zach wasn’t so sure.
“Oh, and I forgot to tell you. I hit Hakim across the shin bones with my hockey stick.”
“You did? What a brave boy you were!”
“Oh, I forgot another thing,” Sammy said. “Britta said to tell you somethin’ if…if she didn’t come back.”
It felt as if a vise were squeezing his heart. He didn’t want to know. Because if he listened to the message, it would be like admitting she was dead, and he wasn’t ready to accept that.
“No, Sammy, don’t tell me. Let’s wait for Britta to tell me herself.”
Sammy brightened at that scrap of hope.
Zach only wished there were someone to give him hope.
Home, not-so-sweet home…
Britta attempted to open her heavy lids, despite the pain that ravaged her body.
“Britta! Britta! Can you hear me?”
Son of a troll! It was Mother Edwina of St. Anne’s Abbey.
Either Britta was being plagued with that bloody dream again, or she had reversed her time travel. Both notions posed great threats to her sanity. So she did the only sensible thing: She succumbed to the pain-sleep again.
Whether mere hours or days had passed, Britta did eventually open her eyes again, and this time wider than a slit. She was still on an abbey cot, still in pain, but not so much as before. “Thirsty,” she choked out.
With Mother Edwina’s help, she sat up, propped against some rolled-up blankets, and drank thirstily from a cup of water. “What happened?” she asked through cracked lips.
“You fell off a cliff when you and Sister Margaret were on your way to Jorvik.”
“No, I mean this time.”
Mother Edwina tilted her head in confusion. “There was only the one time.”
“What? When did I fall off the cliff?”
“Three days past. You have been in a pain-sleep since you were brought back here.”
“Three days? That’s impossible. I was in WEALS for more than three sennights.”
“Wheels? What wheels?”
The blood began to drain from Britta’s head as the certainty of her situation hit her. She was back in time. It was as if all the other had never happened…the time travel, WEALS, and most of all, Zachary. Had she dreamed it all? If so, how could she have dreamed in such detail? No, it had been real. Britta’s heart constricted at the enormity of her loss. Dazed, she shook her head to clear it, and it felt as if knives were cutting into her scalp. Her brain could not handle the strain of unraveling the turmoil, not now, and she fell back into the pain-sleep.
Days went by, and Britta was able to sit, then move about with a makeshift crutch. Her face and body were battered and bruised. She had a broken ankle. But she was alive. The trouble was, she felt no joy in the living.
One sennight after her “return,” whilst still bedridden, her father sent a message informing her of a new groom he had procured for her…procured being a key word. The man was a Norse merchant of much wealth but no lands…Tume Ivarsson. The young man delivering her father’s message warned that this would be her father’s last effort to deal with her amicably—as if he had ever been amicable to her—and the consequences would be on her head if she did not yield. Later, Britta realized that her crafty father deliberately put none of his threats to parchment.
Britta yearned for normal family life, due to that blasted Zachary, no doubt. So, despite the danger, trying to be amicable, she went to Father Caedmon and asked if he had ever in his travels made the acquaintance of Tume Ivarsson.
Father Caedmon recoiled at mere mention of the man’s name.
“What?” Britta wanted to know.
“Amongst other things, he is a slave trader.”
She told her father’s emissary no, but told him to ask her father if he would accept a groom of her choosing. She received a reply later that day via the red-faced messenger, “Never!”
The fact that she’d received the reply so quickly gave Britta fair warning. Her father was nearby. Oh, he would not attack the abbey outright, not wanting the powerful Papacy on his back, but her father was the master of deceit. She re-called the attack on Sister Bernice that had prompted her initial flight from the abbey and her time travel.
The next day, Father Caedmon set off for the minster in Jorvik for some priestly duties and to seek church backing if her father should dare breach the nunnery walls. The ringing of the bells and constant chapel services were lessened in his absence. Thank the gods for that.
It took more than a month for Britta’s ankle to heal, and by then her other injuries were fading. Not so her heart. She missed Zachary and Sammy and her life in the future. At night, she wept for all she had lost.
Britta soon learned what her father had meant by “consequences” if she failed to surrender to his sinister matchmaking. A young nun named Sister Gloria had foolishly left the abbey courtyard to fetch a stray lamb. She had only gone a short distance when captured by her father’s men. Her body was returned to the gate the next day. She had been repeatedly raped, but that was not the worst part. They had slit the tendons behind each knee so that the young woman would be a cripple for life. Days later, when she was able to speak, Gloria told them that Britta’s father had personally said this was the condition Britta would be in when she wed, if she did not yield soon. A woman did not need to stand to be mounted or to give birth, her father had said.
“Is there no one we can approach to protest?” Mother Edwina asked Britta.
Britta shrugged. “We have no proof. My father has friends in high places. The only weapon we have is the Church, and he has made sure there are no witnesses to his sins. Even if we were able to get an audience before King Aethelred’s court, believe you me, they would make Gloria sound like a delusional lackbrain, especially since she suffers those screaming fits. There are two Norse noblemen, Thorfinn of Norstead and Steven of Amberstead, who might help, but how would I contact them? And how long would it take?”
A week later, Britta, now physically healed, had an idea.
“We must needs prepare for an assault from my father.”
&
nbsp; “What?” Mother Edwina was in the abbey kitchen supervising the harvesting of honey from the hundred and more cone-shaped hives on the abbey grounds. Honey was an important product here at the nunnery, their only source of income…or rather, the honeyed mead that they produced from a long-ago Margaret’s recipe.
Right now, there were a dozen nuns working on at least a hundred honeycombs. Cutting off the caps with heated knives. Draining the honey into pottery jugs. Placing the remaining honeycombs over coarse cloths bleeding into pots near the hearth fires; this would be the second extract of lesser-quality honey. Then the honeycombs would be washed, saving that water rinse for sweetening in the kitchen. Finally, they would mash the clean wax combs for winter candle making. It was a long, messy, arduous process.
“I have had dreams,” Britta began.
“Do not speak of the dreams again. Nor time travel. Nor any of your fever-induced fantasies. ’Tis not proper for a nun.”
“I am not a nun.”
“You will be if you stay here much longer.”
The other nuns and novices, working diligently, remained silent but interested in the conversation. Not much happened in a convent, and she was giving them much fodder for talk when they were back in their cells.
“Heed me well, Mother. Danger looms. And it is not just because my dreams tell me so. We live daily with what he did to Sister Gloria. I have gainsayed my father at every turn. He will not give up.”
Several of the nuns shuddered.
“Let me give the women here some defensive training in the military arts.”
Mother Edwina cringed. “Well, mayhap you could do a little training.”
“We would not have to kill anyone, would we?” one young novice asked.
“Only if they try to kill or rape you first.”
Mother Edwina looked rather green at the prospect.
“I have been trained as a warrior, and lately, whilst I was at…well, just lately, I have learned new fighting skills. In the best of battles no one dies, but I tell you, my father and brothers must meet the raven, or they will ne’er stop. You are not to worry. I will take care of them.”
“You would kill your own blood kin?” Mother Edwina inquired.
“I would…if necessary.”
More gasps.
For the next two sennights, Britta tried her best to teach fighting skills to nuns and novices from age thirteen to sixty, with little success. It was one thing to teach the women at The Sanctuary how to fight; they had incentive. These nuns would rather turn the other cheek, no matter the affront. Also, they had been sedentary for a long time and got winded just throwing spears made out of broom handles…and then only several paces away.
“No pain, no gain,” a motto she had learned from the commander back at WEALS, meant naught to these ladies.
Sister Conception muttered in a most un-nunlike manner, “The only pain here is you…a pain in the arse.”
Nor did they understand the SEAL refrain, “The only easy day was yesterday.”
“I mucked the stables yestermorn, scrubbed the stone floors of the scullery, changed bed linens, and hauled firewood,” Sister Egbert said, not even bothering to lower her voice. “What is so easy about that?”
Finally, she stuck with the age-old “God helps those who help themselves.” There was naught they could say to that.
Then everything changed when a group of ten nuns came riding into the abbey courtyard. That they had passed through her father’s ranks was amazing. They were riding horses, which was a surprise in itself; most nuns had no coin for such an extravagance. But the biggest surprise was the woman leading the pack.
She wore the drab garb of a nun, except no head covering. Her hair was coal black, and her eyes a strange shade of blue. It was the nun warrior of her dreams. And she was beautiful.
Britta put a hand to her heart in shock as well as thanks. How many miracles could one person sustain in a lifetime?
But then the biggest shock of all came.
“My name is Angelique. We have come from Frankland to help you,” the woman said, loud enough for all to hear. Then she rode her horse a little farther so that she was right in front of Britta. “Greetings, Sister.”
Good-bye is the saddest word…
For two months, Zach ranted and raved and made himself and everyone around him miserable.
Not only had Arsallah and his evil cohorts gotten away, they still stirred the diplomatic pot by demanding that Sammy be returned to his native country.
Most of all, Zach was devastated by the loss of Britta. After extensive searches, there was no body, but he figured Arsallah had disposed of that, wanting there to be no connection to his evil deeds in the basement of that abandoned house. At first, he had even hoped that Arsallah had taken her back to Afghanistan to use as leverage, but he would have made mention of that by now. Zach had to accept that she was dead.
He was on leave from the SEALs, with good cause. There was no way he could focus, not even on training WEALS. Besides, the class was down to a manageable twenty now. Actually, twenty was more than had been expected to make it through the rigorous training. There would be no Britta, though, and that saddened Zach even more. She had wanted so badly to succeed in WEALS.
Sammy had been very clingy at first, but then, with the resilience of childhood, he settled into his normal routine and hardly ever mentioned the ordeal he had been through. Still, Zach knew that Sammy was worried about his grandfather Arsallah and whether he would try again.
And now his family was pulling an intervention on him. An intervention! Like he was a friggin’ addict or something. They had him trapped in his town house living room, with Sammy upstairs playing video games with Scary Larry.
His grandmother was serving them tea…tea, for Pete’s sake…using a silver tea service and bone china, both of which he hadn’t even known he had. What is bone china anyway? Crushed bones? Yeech! It was a scene right out of Alice in Wonderland. There were fancy-pancy little cookies the size of quarters she’d brought from a bakery that probably cost a dollar a piece. Danny was flicking them into his mouth like popcorn.
His mother and father, divorced almost twenty years, were glaring at each other. They made The War of the Roses look like kindergarten.
“Shape up, boy,” his grandfather said after putting his teacup down. “Everybody loses someone sometime. Get yourself a new assignment. Lose yourself in work. Uncle Sam needs you.”
Yada, yada, yada. He’d heard this spiel a dozen times.
His grandmother gaped at his grandfather as if he’d sprouted two heads. “Nonsense. He needs time to grieve. He may never get over the girl, but in the meantime he must think about Sammy and move on.”
I wonder if there’s any beer left in the fridge.
His mother, romantic that she was, despite having been two-timed by his father numerous times, sighed. “It’s just a shame that you had to find the woman of your dreams, only to lose her. Do you think a person can have two loves?” The latter she addressed to her ex-mother-in-law, his grandmother.
Is that a push-up bra my mother’s wearing? No, no, no, I am not noticing my mother’s assets.
“Of course,” his grandmother replied.
Geez, grandma looks good for her age, too. How old is she now? Seventy-five? No, seventy-six. Wonder if she’s had a face-lift? Hah! Who am I kidding? Everyone in my family has probably had plastic surgery, except my grandfather.
“Come to Hollywood with me,” his dad offered. “You and Sammy can stay in the guesthouse. I’ll introduce you to some women who’ll make you forget your own name, let alone a woman you only knew for a few weeks. Hey, I know. Lori, my housekeeper on Light in the Storm, is between husbands, and she used to be a Playboy bunny.” His dad leered at Zach, something a grown man did not want his father to do.
Are you kidding? I’ve seen Lori. She might have been a Playmate, but it must have been thirty years ago. Besides, I’m not into silicone.
Everyone glared at
his father for his insensitivity.
“Isn’t that just like you, Victor?” His mother sneered. “Thinking with your zipper as usual.”
Oh, boy, here we go.
“Maybe if you’d paid more attention to my zipper, we wouldn’t be divorced.”
This is just like watching a Ping-Pong match. Duel of the divorcees.
“Grow up, Victor. You’re not sixteen anymore. And, by the way, your hair looks silly with those gray streaks.”
I was thinkin’ that myself.
“You know what’s silly, Lillian? You. Modeling for that geezer magazine. If that’s what acting my age is all about, no thank you.”
I think her new career change is cool.
The two of them were practically shaking with anger. A minute more of this, and they’d be clawing each other’s carefully made-up faces. Really, there was a reason why his mother and father were rarely in the same room together, and they were just witnessing it.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Zach stood, then sat down on the couch between the two of them. “This is accomplishing nothing.”
“I hate to say it, but Dad has a point.” Great. Danny was joining the other side. “You need to get laid.”
I do not believe he said that in front of our parents and grandparents. “You think the answer to everything is sex.”
His father, Danny, and Cage and Sly, who were leaning against the wall, all looked at him as if he was crazy. His mother, grandmother, and grandfather all got into a tsk-ing match.
“Seriously, Zach,” Cage said to him. “Britta is gone. Accept that, buddy.”
He hesitated, then nodded. “This whole freakin’ intervention crap is ridiculous…and unnecessary. I’m already making plans to move on.”
“Uh-oh,” Sly said.
“I’m quitting the teams.” He put up a hand to halt the protests that erupted. “I’m selling the town house. And I’m going into hiding with Sammy.”
“Where?” his mother wanted to know.